The Verge got to interview Valve's CEO, Gabe Newell, and the priceless quotes are just flying left and right. "We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination." Others will be making Steambox devices too. Also: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. [...] When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find [Windows 8] unusable." This last point is something I agree with vehemently. Can't comment on Windows 8 on tablets, but on regular PCs it's a schizophrenic, unusable clusterduck. It got me to switch back to Mac and use KDE (on my laptop). Let that sink in for a while.

I think the criticism of it on a non-Touch device is severely overblown.

I dogfood Windows 8 full time on a developer machine, and as a developer, I can hardly think of any usecase that would require more productivity. I think it stresses it pretty well.

I just use the right tool for the job. For example, if I want a full screen browsing experience for content consumption, I'll dip into Metro IE.

If I need to view many tabs at a glance very quickly (say if I have 4-5 MSDN tabs open, a couple more tabs with some stats on app downloasds across WP/W8/PubCenter/AdMob/AdDuplex, and a couple instances of VS open) then I'll use Desktop IE.

Similarly if I'm doing hardcore file management I'll use explorer, but if I just want to browse for an image on my PC, or on SkyDrive or something I'll use the Search Charm with App Pickers.